Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 16, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

SCO rises from the dead

I’ve never been a fan of horror-movie series where no matter what happens to the baddie, such as Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies, he’s up and ready to kill again in the next sequel. So, you can imagine just how pleased I am to see that SCO, just when it looked like it was dead as a doornail, came up with a buyer at the 11th hour and 59th minute.

According to reports on Groklaw, Gulf Capital Partners LLC, a group formed by Stephen Norris of Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners, a private-equity firm, has offered to buy SCO, just as the company faced the end of the bankruptcy road. If the deal is real and goes through, SCO’s nearly dead Unix business will continue, and, oh the pain of it all, so will its zombie-like lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and other Linux companies.

Will this idiocy never end!?

More >

June 15, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Linux 2.6.30’s best five features

Windows and Mac OS updates every few years. Windows 7 arrives on October 22nd and Apple’s Snow Leopard will show up in September. The Linux kernel, the heart of Linux distributions, however, gets updated every few months.

What this means for you is that Windows and Mac OS are taking large, slow steps, while Linux is constantly evolving. Thus, Linux’s changes may not be as big from version to version, but they tend to be more thoroughly tested and stable. What most users will like in this distribution starts with a faster boot-up for Linux.

More >

June 10, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The five best things about Vista SP2

What are the five best things about Vista SP2?

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

That joke out of the way, have you wondered why there’s been almost no reviews of Vista SP2? Well, one reason for that is that Microsoft would really just as soon have you forget about Vista and think about Windows 7 instead. The other is that there’s really not that much new in SP2.

What Vista SP2 really is, when you get right down to it, is all the many fixes and patches that have been made to Vista since SP2. If you’ve been keeping your Vista system up to date, you won’t need to update it.

More >

June 8, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Macs, Windows 7, and Linux

As I write this, the new Mac news is coming out and Microsoft just decided to back down from limiting Windows 7 Starter Edition to no more than three applications. So, why do I think you may want to buy a Linux desktop instead? Easy: Price.

The Macbook still starts at $999. The new 13.3″ display. MacBook Pros starts at $1,199. That’s great! If you’ve got that kind of money to spend…

Let me be the first to say that you do get what you pay for with a Mac. I like them a lot and I own three myself. But, they aren’t cheap and for me they’re business expenses so at the end of the tax year they don’t cost me as much as they do most people.

If you’ve got the money, and you can live with Apple’s proprietary lock-down approach, go ahead and get a Mac. But, if you can’t afford one, and you want some freedom in your software choices, look elsewhere.

More >

June 7, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Dell’s new inexpensive Linux notebook

Last week, all the headlines were about the advancements in the Linux netbook at the Computex trade show, and in all the hub-bub, we all missed that Dell also introduced a great, full-sized notebook at an amazing price: the Dell Inspiron 15n.

Or, at least, I missed it. Fortunately, I was given a call over the weekend and told to give it a look. While I haven’t had a chance to get my hands on one, it sounds wonderful.

More >

June 5, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Chrome on Linux: Rough, fast & promising

I’d been waiting for Chrome on Linux since Chrome first showed up. Chrome, if you haven’t tried it, is the speed-demon of Web browsers. I love it. But, until now, there really wasn’t a version that would run natively on Linux. Starting last night, June 4th, Google released developer’s versions of Chrome for Macs and Linux. They’re rough, really rough, but they’re also really fast. Here’s what I found in my first hours of working with Chrome on Linux.

I downloaded the developer release 3.0.183.1 on two different Linux systems. One was running MEPIS 8 and the other had Ubuntu 9.04. Both are Debian-based Linux distributions, and I chose them for that since Chrome is currently only available in 32 and 64-bit versions in the DEB format. You can install DEB packages in Linux distributions that use RPM program packaging systems, but I didn’t want to introduce any more variables than possible in looking at alpha software.

In the event, while Chrome installed without a hitch in both, on MEPIS, it wasn’t able to connect with any network services, so I dropped looking at it on that Linux for now. On my Ubuntu 9.04 PC it was a different story. On this Gateway 503GR with a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drive, Chrome ran with blazing speed.

More >